Status Updates From Onrustige jeugd: prelude op...

Once when I had nothing else to do I began to look at a crumpled old newspaper in which cheese had been wrapped. In the list of those who had fallen at the front there was printed: “Killed on the Galician front, Lieutenant of Engineers Boris Georgievich Paustovsky” and a little lower: “Killed in fighting near Riga, Ensign Vadim Georgievich Paustovsky.”

These were my two brothers. They had fallen on the same day.

I read a lot in the hospital. Everyone was interested then in Scandinavian writers — Ibsen, Strindberg, Hamsun, Bang. I read a lot of Ibsen, that great manual laborer of the human soul. Then I ran across Muratov’s Images of Italy and I grew giddy with the bitter air of Italian museums and cathedrals. I started to read Andreyev’s The Life of a Man , but I put this book aside for the simple, clean Steppe of Chekhov.